This is the first episode of Deep Dives, a new solo mini-series where Sammie picks apart one side hustle he’s actually working on. First up: digital products, the side income that made him £1,074 in a single 24-hour period and £3,500 in the first 22 days of the year, all on under 60 minutes a day.
Deep Dives is a departure from the usual guest format. Once a month, Sammie is going to sit down and walk through a side hustle he’s personally running at the time, sharing the real numbers rather than a polished case study written up after the fact. This episode was recorded on 22 January, with the results current to that date, so the figures reflect a live experiment rather than a finished success story.
The topic he picked for episode one is digital products: things like ebooks, printables, templates and mini courses that get delivered digitally with no stock, no postage and, done well, very little ongoing time. Sammie explains what actually counts as a digital product, why the economics are so different from anything physical, and the framework he uses to go from idea to sale using short-form content on Instagram. If side income is new territory for you, our guide to <a href=”https://upthegains.co.uk/blog/top-ways-to-earn-a-side-income”>top ways to earn a side income</a> is a good place to see how this fits alongside other options.
Learn more about Couch To 5 Grand HERE >> https://stan.store/upthegainsmoney/p/couch-to-5-grand–passive-income-starter-kit
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Key takeaways
- Sammie made £1,074 in a single 24-hour period and £3,500 in the first 22 days of January, spending under 60 minutes a day on the business.
- A digital product is anything sold online with no physical form: ebooks, printables, cheat sheets, templates and courses.
- The appeal is the economics: near-zero startup cost, no inventory, and profit margins he puts at around 96% once transaction fees are taken out.
- A good digital product solves a problem or makes life easier, and it needs to be easy to use, high quality and marketable.
- His content model is built around short 7 to 9 second Instagram reels that point people to the product, batched in one sitting and scheduled out for the week.
What actually counts as a digital product
Sammie’s starting definition is simple: a digital product is anything you sell online that has no physical form. Ebooks are the obvious example, essentially the digital version of a book delivered as a PDF, and he notes they can run “from a free ebook” used to build a mailing list “up to hundreds of pounds,” depending on the value inside.
From there the category gets much wider. Printables cover things people print out themselves, like planners and checklists. Cheat sheets and how-to guides sit alongside templates, which he says can be “budgeting planners… traveling planners, things like Notion templates, pre-packaged calendars.” Courses are the deepest end, ranging from a couple of downloadable videos to a full structured programme, his example being “learning Spanish for beginners.”
The common thread across all of them, in his words, is that “we’re taking something that you are already passionate about and we’re turning it into a digital product.” He’s clear that not every interest translates, joking that “underwater basket weaving is not going to work,” but almost any genuine hobby or area of knowledge that other people are actively interested in can become the basis of a product.
Why the economics are so different
Sammie’s case for digital products over other side hustles comes down to cost and margin. He pays for Canva, at “$12.99 a month,” to design everything, and uses Google Sheets, which is free, for the writing and prep. There’s no manufacturing, no packaging and, crucially, no inventory: “it doesn’t sit in your room like a big box would… thousands of boxes of products that you’d be ordering from China and trying to flip and sell, you know, doing retail arbitrage or drop shipping.”
The margin is the headline figure. Selling a £10 product, he says, after a transaction fee of a couple of percent, “you get £9.60,” which he calls “96% profit margin.” Scalability follows the same logic: once a PDF exists, “how many times can I sell a PDF? Infinite amount of times.” He also points to the passive element, noting that content posted once “could be paying us while we’re sleeping, while we’re on the train to work.”
To put that in context, he shares his own longer track record: in 2023 his digital products “did over 20 grand,” from just two products, one of which had only been live since July. The January figures he opens the episode with, £1,074 in 24 hours and £3,500 since 1 January, sit on top of that as a fresh, current example rather than a one-off.
What makes a good digital product
Before jumping into building anything, Sammie sets out what he looks for. “A good digital product is actually there to solve a problem,” he says, “or to make someone’s life easier… or to comfort them.” Beyond that, it needs to tick four more boxes: easy to use, easy to understand, high quality, and both scalable and marketable.
He gives quick examples of the kind of ideas that pass that test: a free guide to social media marketing, a how-to guide for a long travel trip, or live cooking classes teaching a specific style of dish. The through-line is specificity. A vague topic doesn’t sell; a narrow, useful angle on something people already care about does.
For finding your own idea, he shares the exact ChatGPT prompt he uses: “I’m passionate about X, Y and Z, looking to launch my own digital products. I’ve yet to kickstart anything like this before, but I have good knowledge in the space. I’m a beginner in digital marketing, so please do bear that in mind. What could be five amazing ideas for my digital product I could look into?” Drop in your own topic and, in his words, “it will spit out some really good ideas.”
The content system behind the sales
The mechanism Sammie uses to actually sell is short-form content on Instagram, aimed at people who are “already liking” content in that niche. He targets them with “seven to nine second short-term reels and stories,” each built around a hook, a quick piece of value, and a call to action pointing to the product, for example commenting a keyword to receive the ebook.
The time commitment claim rests entirely on how this is scheduled. “I pre-batch all of my content, I make a lot of content in waves,” he explains. “I spend a Sunday afternoon and I make a load of content for the week.” Once that’s done, the rest of the week is largely replying to comments and messages, which is how the “under 60 minutes a day” figure holds up across the month rather than describing every single day equally.
Underneath the content sits a five-step structure he uses for every launch: market research and idea validation, branding and messaging, building the product itself, launching with marketing and content, then sales optimisation and scaling. He’s upfront that the terminology sounds more intimidating than the process actually is: “if you’ve got no marketing experience or ever posted something on social media other than a selfie, that is totally fine.”
Realistic expectations and where this can go
Sammie is careful to frame his own numbers as one data point rather than a guarantee, and he uses other examples to show the range of outcomes. He mentions “one girl that’s done £56,000 in 56 days” and a couple whose digital products, built entirely around baking sourdough bread recipes and techniques, “made a million dollars last year.” At the other end, plenty of people never get past the idea stage, which is exactly why he built a structured process around it, called Couch to 5 Grand, a 21-module course aimed at getting beginners to £5,000 in sales within 100 days.
What’s useful for anyone listening without buying anything is the underlying logic: pick something you’re genuinely knowledgeable about, package it into a specific, problem-solving format, and build a simple content habit that funds it rather than trying to do everything from scratch every week. If you’re weighing a side hustle like this against your main income, our <a href=”https://upthegains.co.uk/take-home-pay-calculator”>take-home pay calculator</a> is a quick way to see what you’re actually working with each month before you decide how much time to invest.
Whatever side hustle you land on, it’s worth keeping an eye on where the extra money actually goes once it starts landing. Our piece on <a href=”https://upthegains.co.uk/blog/how-to-audit-your-spending”>how to audit your spending</a> is a useful companion if you want new side income to build savings rather than quietly disappear into everyday spending.
This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited for readability, it may contain errors.
[0:33] Sammie Ellard-King: Alright, welcome to a slightly different episode today. I’m going to be doing a few of these over the next few weeks. They’re more deep dives, I would say, into topics which I think can help you a little bit more to try and increase your income. I’m going to be focusing mainly on side hustles, making money online, that type of thing with these episodes. They’re going to come out on Fridays, probably once or twice a month. And that is really what I’m going to be planning on doing that. But you’re going to be sitting there going, Sammie, why on earth are you coming on and doing these episodes? Well, I’ve built something which I think is really, really cool. We’ll get onto that later in this episode. But this side hustle at the moment is absolutely killing it for me. I did £1,074 in a 24-hour period. It’s done £3,500 since January the 1st, and I’m recording this on January the 22nd. So it’s super powerful. And I’m doing this with under 60 minutes a day. Yes, you heard that right. 60 minutes a day. It is literally insane. So I’m talking about digital products. Now you may have come across digital products before. Essentially, a digital product is a product that you sell online that doesn’t have a physical form or substance. So some popular examples of those are things like ebooks. Now we’ve all seen or read a book before in our lives, you know, a bit weird if you haven’t by now, but essentially ebooks are the digital version of that. And that can range from, you know, 10 pages up to a full-size textbook. And essentially it’s just delivered as a PDF in a digital form. And you’ve probably seen them ranging online from anything from a free e-book. You know, people do give these away for free and they get you onto their mailing list. That’s not something that we do with this, but they can range from you know 99p up to hundreds of pounds. It really depends on the value that you provide. Now, that’s one example of a digital product. This goes way, way deeper. There’s printables, you know, things that you print out like planners, checklists, exercise that becomes a physical thing, but it’s still a digital product, it’s delivered digitally. Cheat sheets, so guides, how-to guides, templates, anything that could be templated, like budgeting planners, um, you know, traveling planners, things like notion templates, pre-packaged calendars, you name it, courses, anything that’s fed online to your, you know, a digital course that you’ve done online, whether that’s an educational course on videos, that could be a couple of videos that you download on TikTok for a couple of quid, right up to a full-blown educational course, which is learning, you know, Spanish for beginners, for example. Yes, could be up 10 minutes for a few months. Really, these are all different examples, and they these they’re the most popular ones when it comes to digital products. Now, the reason why I love this side hustle so much is that what we’re doing is we’re taking something that you are already passionate about and we’re turning it into a digital product. So if you are, let’s say, for example, a massive foodie, we can then turn that side hustle that you’ve got into a product that we can then monetise with an um promote to an audience on social media, and we focus mainly on Instagram. We’ll get into that in a little while, and we can make money out of it. It is really that simple. So, what we do is we extract all of this out. You’re like, oh yeah, great. You know, I like X, Y, and Z. What about underwater basket weaving? No, underwater basket weaving is not going to work, it’s got to be something that people actually are like and enjoy. And you know, we go through that. There’s a full ideation process and a full product building process, and you don’t need any sales and marketing experience to have done this. That’s why it’s so amazing. So, why digital products? Why do we pick them? Well, essentially, they’re low-cost startups, so really, really low cost. You know, I think I pay for Canva, which is $12.99 a month. You know, you can download that for a month, and you there’s hundreds of templates on there. I absolutely love it. It is literally, I use it for everything. I designed my entire life on Canva. It’s an absolutely amazing bit of software. If you’ve not seen it before, check it out. There’s a free version, it’s amazing. Um, and we do all of our design and then we use Google Sheets, for example. That’s a free software, you know, similar to Microsoft Words and Excel. You’ve probably seen been sent a Google Sheet before. So you can do all the writing and all of the prep on there, then build it and design it on Canva. So super low cost, so very, very low cost, and high profit margins. That’s one of the big, big things here. So when you sell a digital product, let’s say you sell it for a 10 quid, the only cost really you’ve got there is yes, you’re right, your time, your sunk cost into building the products. But let’s say we just take that out of the equation. When you sell that product, you’ll probably have a transaction fee, it can be a couple of percent. So let’s say, for example, you sell that and then you sell it for a tenner, and then you get £9.60. Then that’s 96% profit margin, which is just insane. It’s very difficult to find that anywhere else. And there’s no inventory, you know, it doesn’t sit in your room like a big box would, you know, thousands of boxes of products that you’d be ordering from China and trying to flip and sell, you know, doing retail arbitrage or drop shipping. Now, this is not this is not that. This is something you’re already passionate about that we turn into a product and we monetise it. You can do it anywhere as well, so it’s got flexibility and it’s got unlimited scalability. How many times can I sell a PDF? Infinite amount of times. Every single person on the planet could have that PDF. I could sell them that PDF. So that’s why I love it. And also, when we do this work, let’s say, for example, we put out a bit of content. That bit of content could be paying us while we’re sleeping, while we’re on the train to work, while we’re at work, while we’re uh, you know having a bath, you know, doing whatever, you could be earning money from your digital products. Now, in 2023, um, my digital products did over 20 grand, and that’s from two digital products, and one of them I only had live from July. Um, so it just goes to show you the power, and then as I said to you before, in January, you know, we’ve done over three and a half grand. So that is the power of digital products. You can really do this, and I was doing this with 60 minutes a day. So, how the hell did I do that? Yeah, I can hear you saying that. Fair enough. What actually well, first look, what actually makes a good digital product really you need to answer this first. So, a good digital product is actually there to solve a problem, it’s either there to solve a problem or to make someone’s life easier, so or to comfort them, you know, that could also be a thing. But most of the time it’s to solve a problem, it’s got to be easy to use, it’s got to be easy to understand, it’s got to be high quality, scalable, and marketable. That’s what makes a good digital product. That’s what’s something that’s where you’re gonna really sell. Now, we when we go through this, we I’ve got actually, I’m gonna leave a prompt, a ChatGPT. If you’ve not used ChatGPT yet, where have you been? Firstly, for the past few months. Basically, we go through ideation process. Now, these digital products, like these are some examples that I came up with the other day, right? So, the best free guide to social media marketing. So anyone that wants to learn about social media marketing, they’re gonna download that guide. Now, five long travel trips to the South Portugal. Could sell that as a how-to guide, a few quid, seven quid, ten quid, depending on the value that’s in it. Um, cooking classes. I’m gonna do a live cooking classes teaching you how to make, I don’t know, lasagna, the best lasagna, Michelin-style lasagna, whatever that is. You know, you might love Italian cooking, and that’s all you do at home. So you’re gonna monetise it doing this, doing cooking classes about Italian food. Amazing. Now I’ve got a ChatGPT prompt as well, which will show you how to um ideation, how to come up with these digital products. The prompt really simply, I’m passionate about X, Y, and Z, looking to launch my own digital products. I’ve yet to kickstart anything like this before, but I have good knowledge in the space. I’m a beginner in digital marketing, so please do bear that in mind. What could be five amazing ideas for my digital product I could lick into? So I’m a passionate and insert that topic. So you’d insert that topic there, pop it into ChatGPT, which is free to use, and it will spit out some really good ideas. So that’s how you start. So we’re here because I’ve created something called Couch to Five Grand, which is essentially um teaching you how to go from zero to five grand in under a hundred days selling digital products. Now, the road to five grand, what we take you through, step one, we go through some market research, some idea validation. Step two is branding, messaging, and crafting that product. Um, step three is creating the digital products, so actually putting it into place. Step four is launching marketing and content, and step five is sales optimization and scaling up. Now, these might sound like fancy marketing words, and they do, they are a little bit, but don’t worry. Honestly, if you’ve got no marketing experience or ever posted something on social media other than a selfie, that is totally fine. We teach you absolutely everything from the ground up. The main part of this is the content. So the product, as long as it solves a problem, um, you know, let’s say, for example, I’m gonna use investing for beginners because it’s one of mine, it’s really easy for me to talk about. In fact, no, we’re doing the food thing, Italian food. So let’s say I’ve got the 10 dishes that my nonna uh secret dishes that my nonna came up with. Amazing, right? Cool. That’s you know, I’m gonna I really like Italian food. I’ve got I need to cook something this weekend. I’ve got friends coming over. This ebook is solving a problem for me. So it’s got a recipe book, 10 recipes that my nonna kept secret. Um, so how would we get that out there? How would we find these people? So these people are naturally already liking Italian-based food content on Instagram. So we target them with seven to nine second short-form reels and stories on our new Instagram channel. So we create these reels that could be very simply, you know, some us filming, us creating the sauce, how to make the best passata, for example. Um, it would have a really great hook on the content, and then it would be, you know, read more and caption, and you would tell them more about how to make that passata. And it could be like find out more in our ebook, comment pod comment Italian, and I’ll send you my ebook, for example. So we do that through putting up these seven to nine second reels. This is where you’re spending less than 60 minutes a day. We give you the framework, everything you need to make this happen, and it’s actually really good fun. You know, I pre-batch all of my content, I make a lot of content in waves. So I spend a Sunday afternoon and I make a load of content for the week. It’s actually really good fun. It’s a nice use of my time, and then actually I schedule everything out and I don’t do anything for the rest of the week other than you know chatting to people on the store on the comments. If they message me asking questions about the products, I get back to them. It’s a really nice way of doing it. You know, you want to be able to tell a story, build a community, and then we want to get them onto these high-converting sales pages, which we give you as well. So we give you all of this. Now, surely there is more to it than this. And you’d be absolutely right in saying that. Now, Couch to Five Grand is a 21 module course. It’s beginner-friendly, it’s designed for you to create and launch your own digital products, and we want you to get to five grand in sales in under 100 days. And it includes step-by-step guides, checklists, tutorials for your products. Uh, it’s my entire content strategy from top to bottom, the simple sales techniques that I use every single day to make sales. There is over 100 digital product ideas, there’s templates, there’s how to set up your own store and high-converting sales pages, there’s the secrets behind a successful launch, how to do the content properly. You go from newbie to expert, basically, in these 21 modules. And it is really for anyone who is semi-professional with a camera phone, uh, aspiring entrepreneurs, basically professionals, creative individuals, passive income seekers, stay-at-home parents, students, digital marketing beginners. These are the people that it’s great for because you can do this in your own time. And as I say, you can schedule a lot of this as well. So you could do a whole load of work on the Sunday. Let’s say you, you know, 60 minutes a day, you do four or five hours on the Sunday in a couple of weeks, a couple of, you know, 10-15 minutes a day. That work is already pre-batched and done. So we’re putting out this content that’s going to sell your digital products, you’re going to start making income. And that is why I think it is one of the most amazing side hustles right now. Now, if you’re listening to this podcast, there is a launch happening right now, this second. So we’ve got it out for a special price. Um, it will be going up to a full price very soon. So don’t miss out. I’m going to keep it like this till the 31st of January at this price, and then it’ll be going up a little bit. But if that does sound interesting to you, hop on over. There is a link down below in the description. Get a hold of it and we can get you going. We also have a premium community. If you do want to join the premium community, drop me a message. There is a link inside the course to join the premium community. Yes, it is a little bit of an extra cost, but there is over 30 people in there right now. This is growing by the day. Um, and you get access to me. So you can ask me questions inside the course. You also um I do a monthly call and then I do a monthly mastermind as well. So you get two calls every month. So we do group coaching. Basically, it holds you accountable for you getting to that five grand. We want to get you to that five grand and under that hundred days, ideally, a lot sooner. Some some people have gone from zero to tens of thousands of pounds in a matter of days. You know, I know one girl that’s done £56,000 in 56 days, so it is totally possible. It is some crazy money to be made right now, and this is free. Like the platform is free. This is your knowledge. You already know all of this stuff. So if you’re semi-knowledgeable about a topic, you know, I’ve seen this is how mental this stuff is, right? There’s a couple that made a million dollars last year. Their channel is about baking sourdough bread. That’s it. So their digital products are all around baking sourdough bread and different recipes and different techniques, and they’ve actually got a few products now that they they they central all their content around, and they made a million dollars last year. So if you feel like your idea is stupid, as long as there’s a community of people out there that are interested in it, and we do and we check all of that stuff, so don’t worry, um, then you you you 100% have got a business there. So look, this is digital products, this is a couch to five grand, this is the launch of it. I wanted to do a little podcast, introduce you to the topic. Um, but yeah, let’s get you involved, and we’ll see you soon. Bye.
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